Witch Angel

by Trana Mae Simmons

  Alaynia whirled on him and stuck her face right up in his. “We won’t discuss one damned thing, Shain St. Clair! Do I have to repeat myself? I’ve already accepted this job and, come hell or high water, I’ll see it through. I’m going to plan this house and see it constructed right from the fruit cellar all the way through to hanging the last curtain! If you don’t want me staying at Chenaie while I do that, I’ll move over to Jake’s. He can fix me up a room in the cabin!”

  “The hell you will!” Shain shouted.

  “The hell I won’t!” Alaynia yelled back.

  Chapter 17

  Long before Jake arrived the next morning, Alaynia and Jeannie put their heads together over their morning coffee and chocolate. While they talked, Tiny curled up in a basket Jeannie had found somewhere and padded with a blanket, snoring gently.

  “I’m sure our carpenter can make you a table like you want,” Jeannie said. “What did you call it—a drafting table?”

  “Uh-huh,” Alaynia replied. “I’ve got all my drawing supplies with me, and the table needs to have a smooth surface, which I can tilt and spread my paper out on. I’ll place it in front of the window seat, so I’ll have plenty of light during the day. I’ll need a stool to sit on, too, like the one I saw in the kitchen the other day.”

  “Can I watch while you work?” Jeannie said eagerly. “Maybe help you out? I promise not to bother you.”

  “You wouldn’t be a bother at all,” Alaynia assured her. “But you might as well know that your brother’s not a bit happy about me being in charge of building Jake’s house. In fact, I thought I was going to have to move over to Jake’s to be able to continue with this job. He might forbid you to have anything to do with it.”

  “Oh, pooh,” Jeannie said. “Shain’s so old-fashioned. That’s why I never tell him when I help Jake out. Jake’s taught me what all his tools are for, and I’m going to learn to drive his harvest machine when he gets it ready. Shain’s always so busy he hardly ever asks me what I do over at Jake’s, so I never bring it up. And Zeke lets me help feed the animals and gather eggs. He’s taught me to make jambalaya, too, and cook over an outside fire. Our cook won’t even let me fix my own chocolate. It’s so boring being a woman, Alaynia. Men have much more fun.”

  Hiding her smile, Alaynia replied, “But you’ve got your dinner party to plan, don’t you? And lessons?”

  “My tutor only comes two hours a day, three times a week, and I can plan the party in the evenings. The invitations are already out, and all that’s really left is to decide on the menu. The cook will take care of ordering the food she needs, and Netta will help serve. Please, Alaynia. It must be awfully exciting to plan an actual house and have it built. Why, it must be almost like having a child—knowing something will remain for years after you’re dead and gone.”

  Amazed at Jeannie’s astuteness, since that was exactly how she felt herself, Alaynia reluctantly nodded her head. “But,” she said when Jeannie’s eyes brightened, “you’ll have to ask Shain for permission. It won’t go easy on either of us, if he thinks we’re hiding something from him.”

  “He’ll never let me go over and watch the house actually being built,” Jeannie said with a pout. “He’ll say the men might slip and say a swear word within my hearing. Shoot, listening to Shain and Cole when they didn’t know I was around is where I learned a lot of words that they don’t think I know. ‘Course I don’t know what some of them mean.”

  Alaynia laughed gaily and drained her coffee cup. She would enjoy Jeannie’s company, especially since Shain had avoided her after they arrived back at Chenaie yesterday afternoon. Beyond growling a disgruntled ‘no’ when she asked if she should get her things together and move to Jake’s, he’d had nothing further to say to her. He hadn’t put in an appearance at supper and, though she had lain awake well into the night, she never heard him enter his room. This morning his booted footsteps clumping down the hallway had been her alarm clock.

  His not understanding how much designing and building Jake’s house meant to her hurt deeply. Instead, he only seemed concerned for appearances—what his neighbors would think about a woman working among a bunch of construction men. Her pride in knowing she could accomplish the job due to her own past arduous work at educating herself had suffered a severe blow at his denigration of her hard-won experience. Never mind the fact Shain was a nineteenth-century man—unused to the freedom women enjoyed in her time. He should have been able to see how she yearned for his support in this job.

  She and Jeannie walked out into the hallway and started down the stairwell in search of the carpenter. Tuning out Jeannie’s ever-constant chatter, she continued her thoughts in her head. Shain wanted a woman in a white, frothy dress, which swirled in the wind and was appropriate with the gingerbread backdrop of the gazebo. She offered him a woman in work boots, with dirt sometimes under her fingernails. Shain wanted docile femininity—she had only her pride in the accomplishments she’d gained herself in a male-dominated career field.

  Why couldn’t he understand she’d left her entire world behind when she drove through that time warp? He offered her protection and a place to stay—she wanted her independence back, along with her self-respect, which was a part of her sense of achievement at the end of a job well done. She’d never risen above the thrill of a new phone call from a potential customer, who’d heard about her work from someone else. She knew only one way to handle a job once she’d taken it on—to throw her entire creative being into doing top-notch work.

  She loved a long, luxurious soak in a bubble bath as well as the next woman and religiously had her hair styled at least once a month, though her hardhat matted her curls. Beneath her jeans and work shirt, she wore skimpy, frilly bras and bikini panties. She relished the impact she made when she transformed herself by wearing a wickedly dangerous cocktail dress to a party given by one of her customers to celebrate the completion of a renovation job, but that happened infrequently.

  And she darned sure enjoyed rubbing elbows with a crew of men hired to turn her creations into reality, instead of innocuous lines on paper—men who had to explicitly follow her directions, if they wanted payment for their work.

  As she and Jeannie walked across the backyard toward the stable, where Jeannie had informed her the carpenter would probably be repairing the roof, a vision of the white bolt of material Madame Chantal had carried from her back room swam in Alaynia’s head. Her lips curved into a secret smile. She could be both—feminine, as well as a woman able to hold her own in a male world. The attention she had gleaned from males at the cocktail parties made her aware that, dressed in a sexy outfit, she garnered her share of masculine regard. It wasn’t really fair, though, she tried to tell herself, to use her feminine charms to entice Shain. But the desire between them had already proven to be a white-hot longing. There had to be some compromise somewhere. Or else ...

  As Jeannie called to the carpenter to please climb down from the roof so they could speak to him, Alaynia thought, Or else I guess I’d better start looking more seriously for that time warp, before these feelings I have for Shain make me want to stay here just to be near him.

  That wouldn’t work at all, she realized with a deep sense of pain. How many times had she heard the saying that real love meant wanting true happiness for the person you loved? Shain deserved to find a woman who suited his needs for a wife. She could never be that woman—more than a century of time and attitudes separated them.

  If she couldn’t find the time warp, though, how could she spend the rest of her life as a bystander to Shain’s life on Chenaie? Of course, Jake would probably offer her a home, but she couldn’t bear to watch Shain marry another woman some day—raise their children at Chenaie. Better for her to read the details in the genealogy section of the future.

  She would at least get the plans ready and the construction started. It could progress without her after that, and maybe she would be able to find her creation still standing near the Chenaie waiting back in the
future for her.

  * * * *

  Late that afternoon, Alaynia wandered into the Jake’s barn, swiping at her dripping face with a bandanna. Despite her exhaustion, she felt better than she had since arriving in this past time period. The cutoff blue jean shorts and work boots she’d dug out of her suitcase and brought over to Jake’s with her were faded old friends, and the tails of the sleeveless men’s work shirt flapped comfortingly around her hips as she walked.

  She wouldn’t be able to wear her shorts when the work crews began arriving, but Jake hadn’t batted an eye after she changed in his workshop and joined him to measure the house site. Now she pulled the notebook filled with neat figures from beneath her arm and walked to the far end of the barn, where she could hear Jake pounding on something.

  Jake glanced up, then laid his hammer aside and waved her over to the wooden table where he was working. “Got some figures for me?”

  “Yes, I do.” She opened the notebook and spread it on the table. Instead of immediately explaining the figures, though, she frowned and tried once more to discuss what she had pointed out to Jake earlier that day. “I really wish you’d reconsider the site you’ve chosen. I don’t like the sounds coming from that logging operation on the hillside behind you.”

  “Shoot, Alaynia, they’ll be done one of these days; then the noise will be gone. And we decided to set the house facing away from that hill. I’ll make Escott an offer for that property back there, since it won’t be worth much after the timber’s gone. Then I can hire it replanted with pine. It’ll make a nice view from my back veranda after that.”

  “You’ll have to do that fairly quickly. In fact, it’d be best to start replanting behind the timber crew. From what I’ve read about the weather down here, your winters are mostly rainy. Do you have any idea how fast erosion can ruin a hillside stripped bare of timber?”

  “I heard Escott left town on business this week,” Jake said with a shrug. “I can’t talk to him until he gets back. Maybe I can work something out with him. For now, why don’t you show me what you’ve come up with?”

  “Jake, it’s not just the erosion. There’s a wicked overhang halfway down that hillside that I don’t like the looks of. It’s been protected by the growth all around it so far, but they’re timbering above it, and part of your barn’s right in the path of that, should it ever let go.”

  “It’s stood for hundreds of years, but I’ll keep your warning in mind. Now, the figures?”

  Stifling her worry over what could happen to the hillside, given her knowledge of the mudslides in California in her time, Alaynia spent the next ten minutes going over her plans, with Jake nodding agreement. When she was finished, she tore out one page of the notebook and handed it to him, explaining that it was a duplicate schedule of the different stages of construction, along with the time frames for each.

  “If I’m not here to finish your house, Jake, you’ll have this to go by. And once I have the blueprints ready, I’ll bring them over here and leave them.”

  “Then you’re still determined to try to get back to your own era?”

  “Yes,” Alaynia replied quietly. “I think it’s best.”

  Jake studied her craftily for a moment before he shrugged and looked over at her car, which sat in a corner, gleaming in the dimness. The tarp he usually kept it covered with lay in a rumpled heap on the floor.

  “How much do you know about how that thing works?” he asked. “I mean, beyond what you’ve told me so far—putting gasoline in it to make the engine run.”

  “Not much more than that,” Alaynia said with a sigh. “That black box in the front’s a battery, and beneath those screw caps, in the holes, is something called battery acid. Here, I’ll show you.”

  They walked over to the car, and Alaynia waited until Jake raised the hood, then pointed at the battery compartment.

  “Those clamps on the side connect it somehow to the rest of the engine,” she explained. “When I turn the key in the ignition switch on the steering wheel column, the energy from the battery ignites the spark plugs, and they ignite the gas. There’s something called an electronic ignition that does all that.”

  “Then if that battery doesn’t work, nothing else will either, huh?”

  “Yeah. In my time, a mechanic could connect the battery to a charger that works off electricity and recharge it. Then it’ll work for a while, until you can buy a replacement. But there’s no electricity here to recharge it with.”

  “Everything I know about physics says that traveling through time is impossible,” Jake mused. “But since you did it, perhaps the trip drained all the energy from this system. I don’t think we have a hope at all of making this work again with what we’ve got available back in this period. And I really don’t think this car has anything to do with how you got here.”

  Alaynia chuckled wryly, and Jake frowned questioningly at her.

  “I was just thinking about a movie I saw once,” Alaynia said. “There was a car named Christine, and it had a life of its own. That was a fantasy, though.”

  “A movie?”

  Alaynia’s explanation of movies led to a discussion of all the other things Jake would consider wondrous in her world, and another half-hour passed. She found herself surprised at how many of the concepts Jake was already familiar with, until she remembered the sheaf of mail he had picked up at the post office. Evidently, some of his friends were inventors, and they traded discussions and theories in their correspondence.

  It wasn’t too much of a jump from telegraphs to telephones, Jake told her as they talked. The same concept of sending sounds over wires ought to work with voices. And Ben Franklin had theorized about electricity years and years ago. Harnessing that power could lead to all kinds of labor-saving devices.

  “It’s not too hard to imagine, either,” Jake said, “that once people have more freedom from work, they’d want some sort of entertainment to fill their leisure hours. That they’d be willing to pay for things like your television and movies.”

  During their discussion, something kept niggling at Alaynia’s mind, and she listened with half an ear as Jake expounded on the theory of how changing forms of matter released energy, which could be turned to man’s use. Boiled water changed to steam particles, which could power boats. Burning gas released heat, which in turn caused chemical changes in the metal or other materials heated over the flames.

  “Jake,” Alaynia finally interrupted him, “you said something earlier that I don’t understand.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You said that time travel’s impossible. Yet, here I am, in a dimension that’s not supposed to exist—with people who have been long dead in my time. If it’s impossible, how did it happen to me?”

  Jake screwed up his face and chewed his bottom lip for a long moment. Shrugging his shoulders, he avoided Alaynia’s gaze and murmured, “I just said that it’s against everything I know about physics—as in rational, explainable theories. You mentioned other dimensions, and some people do believe those exist. One of those is a totally unexplainable dimension, but almost every culture has made a stab at setting forth a rational theory on it. Everything has to be taken on faith, though, because no one alive can tell us what it’s like in reality.”

  Alaynia’s breath caught in her throat. She could feel the blood drain from her face, and a cold chill ran up her spine. Her entire body froze into immobility, though her mind raced frantically. It couldn’t be—it had to be. Disjointed thoughts burst into her consciousness one after the other, quickly denied as inconceivable and just as quickly surfacing to be scrutinized once again. Black spots danced on the edge of her vision, but her paralyzed muscles refused to relax so she could draw in a breath.

  Jake grabbed her arms and shook her. “Alaynia! Snap out of it, Alaynia! You’re going to faint!”

  When she failed to respond, Jake slapped her smartly on the cheek. She flinched, then stared at the little man, gasping in a breath of air. Jake tenderly took h
er arm and led her over to the table, where her trembling legs collapsed beneath her. She grabbed the table top, until Jake hurriedly shoved a stool beneath her bottom and pushed her onto it.

  “I’m sorry,” Jake murmured over and over again. “Alaynia, I’m sorry. Speak to me. I’m so sorry I had to hit you. I wish I hadn’t done that, but you weren’t even breathing. Forgive me. Please.”

  Alaynia buried her face in her hands, and shook her head back and forth. A low moan of misery escaped her throat. “No,” she whimpered. “It can’t be that some sort of spiritual intervention led me into that time warp. I don’t believe in things like that!”

  Suddenly Jake pulled her hands away from her face and gripped her chin in his fingers, forcing her tear-filled eyes to meet his gaze. “All right, that’s enough,” he demanded. “What happened to the Alaynia who arrived here full of piss and vinegar? The woman I was proud to accept as my niece? The woman who’s got Shain St. Clair wrapped around her little finger, when every female of marriageable age in this parish has been trying to get him to propose for years?”

  “Shain,” Alaynia whispered in a tortured voice. “Jake, he’ll never accept this. He’s alluded to the stories about Chenaie at times, but he thinks they’re crap. They’re not, Jake. I’ve felt something at Chenaie myself.”

  Jake pulled another stool closer and sat down, taking her hands in his and squeezing them comfortingly. “Maybe you better tell me what’s been happening to you over there. I can’t promise that I’ll believe you either—after all, science has been my life for over sixty years—but at least I’ll listen with an open mind. You have to understand, Alaynia, that stories like those told about Chenaie frighten some people.”

  “Shain’s never been afraid of anything in his life,” Alaynia scoffed.

  “Yes. Yes, he has, my dear. Any man who’s been in battle and seen death all around him’s been terrified—questioned why he came through unscathed while his friends fell all around him. In the back of his mind, he’s known that in the next clash he could be one of the bodies buried in a mass grave his loved ones will never find. Men don’t tell their women about those fears, Alaynia. They only talk about them to other men, and then only to men they trust—men who know the talk about the glory of battle is meaningless and that a man’s ideals falter awfully quickly in the face of all that carnage.”